Final Vinyl Days (11 page)

Now this coed comes in. Tie-dye is
back
, torn jeans, leather sandals. If her hair wasn't purple and aimed at the ceiling, I could just about console my grief. “Can I help?” I ask, totally unprepared for the high squeak of a voice that comes out. She sounds like she just inhaled a balloon full of helium.

“I want
The Little Mermaid
,” she says. She is wearing a high school ring on her finger. “You know, the video? It's for my little brother.”

“Yeah, right. Over there.” I point to the far wall, the latest addition to any record/CD/video store, a menagerie of colorful piñatas swinging overhead. “We got 'em all.”

Oh, yeah. We've got a two-foot table boasting the end of my youth, leftover albums, the bottom of the barrel. It's all that's left and nobody stops to look, to mourn, to pay respect. I arranged them such that Joni Mitchell is the one looking out on the dreary day. I imagine someone coming in from the street and saying, “Oh, I get it,
paved paradise and put up a parking lot
,” but no such luck; there is no joy in Mudville.

I try to make myself feel better. I think of the positive factors in my life. I recycle my cans and glass and paper. I ride a bike instead of driving a car. Though my old man and I don't see eye to eye, I know that I'll never turn to find him with a gun pointed my way like Mr. Gaye did to Marvin. I sleep peacefully, all bills paid, no TV blasting MTV like the one across the street in the cinder-block house where a couple of girls come and go. One of them is nice-looking in a kind of Marlene way, wears gym clothes all the time, no makeup, hair long and loose. Though I know sure as hell if I slept with her she'd get up and put on lipstick and control-top pantyhose and ask me why I don't cut my hair and get a real job. It's the luck of the draw, and my luck is lousy. “Give up the Diet Coke,” I had told Betts. “Give up the fluorescent foods.” I had told Marlene to give up the self-pity; if she wanted to be somebody, then to stop talking about it and be it. I had suggested
to Xan that she give up the body hair. I told the boss to be
different
, not to cave in to all this new crap. The bottom line? Nobody likes suggestions. So why am I supposed to be different?

“What can you tell me about the Byrds?”

My heart leaps up and I turn to face the purple-haired squeaky-voiced girl who has placed
The Little Mermaid
on the counter and has a twenty clutched in her fist.

“Yeah? The Byrds? Like ‘turn, turn, turn?'”

She looks around, first one way then the other. Then she looks back at me, face young and smooth and absolutely blank. “The pink ones,” she squeaks and points upward where flamingo piñatas swing on an invisible cord. “How much?”

I watch her walk off now, her pilgrim shoes mud splattered as she heads through the construction area, her pink bird clutched to her chest along with
The Little Mermaid
. It's times like this when I start thinking I might give my dad a call and say, “I know you've been saying how you want me to take over your business some day.…” It's times like this when I start thinking about Marlene, when I start forgetting how bad it all got. I do crazy things like start to imagine us meeting again, one more try at this perfect 1970 romance. Like maybe I
will
go to work for my dad, and in my off-hours maybe I'll get out the old power
saw and make my mom a TV table (just like you've been saying you wanted, Mom), and maybe I'll circumcise the old index finger and end up in the emergency room, and I'll look down a row of plastic chairs and there she'll be. It's not the
perfect
fantasy, but it's one I have. It's one that more and more starts looking good after I watch Marvin's music revived by a bunch of fat raisins dancing around on the tube, or after I see a series of younger and younger women arriving at my door in their spider hose and stiff neon hair, their arms filled with little plastic squares, a mountain of CD covers dumped on my floor.

My friend Mary Edna goes out every night of the week. She has a few drinks and then dances until they close the door of Roy's Holiday Lounge. It's on I-95, so she's forever meeting folks passing through town. One day she dances with somebody from Dixon, Illinois, and then it's Richmond, Virginia, and of course she has a steady batch from the army base just an hour away. Once she met somebody from Saudi Arabia (she said
Saudia
Arabia), and she talked about that for weeks, as if touching his dark hairy hands (her description) had linked her to lands and histories unknown, like he might be an oil sheik and come a calling again. Lord. She wears their towns like badges, remembers them better by the sorts of details that
a tourist might remember than she does hair or eye color (she does always provide that information as well, though it's clear after years of this that she is not a choosy woman). I suggested once, in a moment of sarcasm, that she get one of those big maps and start sticking pins in it, like all those richer-than-thou folks who have in mind seeing every square inch of the planet. I said, “You can get different colored pin heads—fast dancer, slow dancer, smoker, joker, poker, toker, and any of the above.” She claims that the only time she ever slept with one of her late-night acquaintances was with the one with cancer who had never had oral sex. It was on his list of things to do on earth—it was right under “see the Grand Canyon” and right above “eat snails and frogs in a French diner.” She sure can pick them.

I have tried on many occasions to adopt Mary Edna's children; I feel I might as well, since all those nights their mama is out playing around, they are here at my house taking bubble baths and doing their homework. They stare at me with round brown eyes while we sit around my kitchen table, all three of us in footie pajamas. I rent movies like
Thomasina
and
The Parent Trap
and
Old Yeller
, and we eat big bowls of ice cream with Hershey's syrup, just like I did when I was a kid—like I did with Mary Edna beside me in the house on Fourth Street, my grandmama's
house. I thought the two of us would grow up to catch the world by its tail like a comet, and now I look at us and wonder what on earth happened. I told her just the other day that this was what I was wondering, and she asked, who did I think we were, those idiots who committed suicide in hopes of riding a comet? I realized right then that we did not have the same memories and never would. We were two girls with so much in common, and yet we had walked away with such different messages; hers was find a man, any man, and mine was find a decent man—a kind, smart, hard-working, loving man, with something on the brain other than what is edible, and if you don't find him, stay by yourself and get a few friends at the SPCA.

What did Mary Edna and I have in common all those years? We were the two girls at school who were not in what the teacher called “a traditional home.” Every time that phrase was spoken people turned around in their seats and stared at us. Mary Edna grinned and waved at everybody like she might have been the home-coming queen, but I hated those moments. I kept saying to Mary Edna, “That kind of attention is
not
good,” but she didn't hear a word I said. She believed then (as she still does) that any attention is better than nothing. And
she got plenty of attention with botched-up marriages and unwanted pregnancies, one drug bust and one shoplifting scene (two padded bras and a lime green dickey from J.C. Penney). I told her I would have given her the money, maybe not for that ugly dickey, but for practical underwear items that she needed, yes, I'd've bought those. I told her that while she was out getting herself all the attention that she missed as a child because her parents were do-nothing alcoholics, her own children were suffering. But again, she did not seem to hear.

Mary Edna lived with her mother's various relatives and whoever from the church invited her home, and I lived with my grandma because my mother was too young to be a mother; my mother wanted a chance in life, and Grandma felt like she deserved that. I think of it as the chain reaction of mamas. Everybody is guilty; everybody is trying so hard to make up for her mama's failures. We all learn from one another. For example, my grandma used to always say “work like a nigger,” and I had to preach long and hard for years to convince her that it did not sound nice. She said it wasn't racist because they
did
work hard, and I gave up explaining the point. Still, she has come around enough that now she'll get that
n
sound coming through her nose and then catch
herself. Now she says things like “He works like a n-n-nun” or “She works like a noogie.”

“A noogie?” I asked, and she waved her hand and said I knew what she meant. Grandma and I aren't where we should be but we keep on moving. She is all I have.

And come to think of it, I guess that's where my life differs from Mary Edna's. At her house everything was coarser, shakier. She claims her mother's first cousin never touched her but that she was always scared he might, that his face haunted her, and she discovered early that the more men she was with, the further she could get from that feeling. He is doing time by now, anyway. Her third ex-husband is probably the only person other than me and my grandma who ever really loved her, but he finally gave up and married a quiet, nearly homely woman from a neighboring town. I think he got as far from Mary Edna and her need to make somebody hurt her as he could—both of them running like rabbits, leaving the girls to stare out at the world with their round-eyed fear. They are four and five, dark-eyed beauties who deserve a hell of a lot better. I have thought of stealing them and driving to the west coast, except that would be one more example of running, and I think more than anything they need a spine of steel; they need to stand tall until they can safely
walk forward. These days more kids are not in “a traditional home” than are—and those that are will one day go into a therapy office and say how very lucky they were, or they will say how the facade of a traditional family does not a traditional family make. There is no human with the answers.

Speaking of dysfunction and mama failures, I only met my mama once, and she was an absolute mess. My grandma said, “This is what I gave up my life for you to do?” My mama sat there like a big overstuffed chair, her toenails looking like she'd been digging potatoes. Mary Edna has always said that that's why she's big on painted toenails in the summer; you can hide the dirt. I told her that soap and water is another fine way to deal with the dirt—you can get rid of that dirt if you desire. That's what I wanted to tell my mama. I wanted to say, “Liberate yourself—shed that filth and pestilence.” I wanted to tell her that mothers don't come with a warranty; that she could at least try to make it up to me. I was, after all, trying so hard to forgive her, especially if she bathed and did something with her hair. Her name is Ashley Amelia, and I had spent much of my childhood mooning over that name and creating wonderful romantic adventures for my mother in my head. The one picture my grandma had of her was from a high school yearbook where she looked
no different from the other girls lined up there in the home ec class. My grandma could almost always kill a fantasy with warnings like “Things ain't always as they look, sound, or smell.”

I recently read that all of these foreign people were given a list of English words and asked to select which one sounded most lovely. Nine out of ten people chose “diarrhea.” This certainly seemed to fit my life. I hope those people weren't embarrassed when they found out what their chosen word meant. I hope they just shook their heads and laughed about how you just can't count on anything to be as it appears.

My mother was having trouble acting like a mother. It was more like she was my long-lost sister or cousin; she got along fine with Mary Edna. She showed us pictures of the latest man to dump her, and my grandma and I both shook in fear to see such an ugly face. For all the things my grandma had always said about the boy who had fathered me—a thick thatch of hair parted too far to the right, so that it pitched off like a rooftop (deceiving hair, because it made him seem sweet, when really he was the devil incarnate)—he was far superior to this thing in the photo. She stared down at his ugly face (even Mary Edna
couldn't bear to look at the photo, said it stunk fumes off the paper) like she was in a stupor and said she didn't know why he treated her so bad. She said his words sometimes were so mean they cut her to the bone, though for the life of me I couldn't see a bone through that balloon of a body. I kept thinking that his words must have punctured, sliced like a knife does a melon. He ate what was edible and trashed the rest, and she had been rotting ever since, carrying that sweet, rotten smell of decay in her every pore and crevice. When she said she guessed she better head to the bus station, my grandma did not try to stop her, as I'm sure she wished somebody would. My grandma said she couldn't afford to keep her around and give her the liquor that without a doubt was close to killing her. Grandma said that when the time came, she wouldn't even need to be embalmed. I pictured this huge woman bottled up like those old pickled eggs they used to sell in the little grocery store down the road.

“My mama is all but dead,” I kept thinking, and when she opened her arms to hug me, I felt like my heart was breaking. Here she was, already a ghost and replaced with this fleshy apparition.

If I was a child I might've been shuffled off to DSS but instead my friend Elizabeth, the third-grade teacher I am the assistant for, came and took me out to lunch, got me
to talk about these things, cry a little bit. Elizabeth is a saint. If Mother Teresa had been five feet nine inches with wild red hair and was pro-choice, that would be Elizabeth. Sometimes I like to stand and look in through the glass of her front door and see her inside with her husband and baby; just this glimpse is all I need to make me hang on for what will be right for me. I want things to be clean, sober. I want Mary Edna to want the same things, but she is nowhere near seeing it all my way.